her tin skin

By Evie Shockley Evie Shockley

i want her tin skin. i want

her militant barbie breast,

resistant, cupped, no, cocked

in the V of her elbow. i want

my curves mountainous

and locked. i want her

arabesque eyes, i want her

tar markings, her curlicues,

i want her tin skin. she

is a tree, her hair a forest

of strength. i want to be

adorned with bottles. i

want my brownness

to cover all but the silver

edges of my tin skin. my

sculptor should have made

me like her round-bellied

maker hewed her: with chain-

saw in hand, roughly. cut

away from me everything

but the semblance of tender.

let nothing but my flexed

foot, toeing childhood, tell

the night-eyed, who know

how to look, what lies within.

—after alison saar’s “compton nocturne”

Source: the new black (Wesleyan University Press, 2011)

Biography

Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, poet Evie Shockley earned a BA at Northwestern University, a JD at the University of Michigan, and a PhD in English literature at Duke University. The author of several collections of poetry, including a half-red sea (2006) and the new black (2011), Shockley is also the author of the critical volume Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry . . .

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